Two ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo told Human Rights Watch
yesterday that they had been raped by Serbian security forces while
being held captive in Kosovo. Three other rape victims from the same
village have also reported their cases to doctors in northern
Albania. The two victims, from the village of Dragacin in the Suva
Reka municipality, gave testimony that was detailed and credible.
Many aspects of their stories were corroborated by eight other women
villagers, interviewed separately. Human Rights Watch is withholding
the names of the victims at their request to protect them from
government retaliation.All of the women interviewed told how the
police surrounded the village of Dragacin on April 21. Most of the
men fled into the mountains, but between 200 and 300 women (including
fifty women from the nearby villages of Mujlan and Dujle (in
Albanian)), as well as eleven elderly men, stayed behind. The
security forces gathered the entire group in a field, where they
searched and then separated the eleven elderly men, including a
ninety-three-year-old man named Ymer. None of the men have been seen
since, although three of the women interviewed said they later saw
one of the eleven men lying dead in a Dragacin street.

The government security forces divided the women randomly into three
private houses in the village (the houses of Shahin T., Avdi T. and
Halil T.), where they were held for three days. During this time, the
women were repeatedly threatened and harassed. One woman said that
the police held a knife to her three year-old boy, saying that they
would kill him if she didn't produce gold or money. Certain women
were compelled to cook and clean for Serb forces. Some were forced to
have sex with their captors.

The two rape victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch were held in
the same house, which was crowded with frightened women and children.
Women held in other houses described similar conditions. One of the
victims described how she was sexually abused on two occasions,
during one of which she was raped. At approximately 4 p.m. on her
second day of captivity, she was "chosen" from among a large group of
women by a man in a green camouflage uniform. The man took her to
another house and raped her, she said. The following day another man
demanded she go with him to a different house some ten minutes' walk
away. According to the woman's account, the man did not tell her
where he was taking her or why, but instead pushed her forward with
his gun when she started crying. The house was full of members of the
Serbian security forces, she told Human Rights Watch. They asked her
questions, using a mixture of gestures and very basic words to
communicate, as the woman hardly understood Serbian. They asked her
age -- twenty-three, she said -- whether she had any children, and
the whereabouts of her husband. They asked her for money. When she
told them that she had none, they ordered her to take off her
clothes. She started crying and pulling out her hair, which made the
men laugh. They put on some music. After she took off her clothes,
the men approached her one by one as she stood before them naked. She
told Human Rights Watch that all of them looked at her, then they
left her alone in the room with the man she believed to be their
commander, and another officer. The commander, whom she recognized as
such because he had gold stars on his cap and he issued orders to
others, had ordered another the others around, reclined on his back
about ten feet away from where the victim and the officer were lying
on a bed. The man on the bed, who was nude, touched her breasts but
did not force her to touch him. "I kept crying all the time and
pushing his hands away," she said. "Finally he said to me, I'm not
going to do anything. The commander just stared at us." After about
ten minutes, the other soldiers returned to the room and, still nude,
the woman was forced to serve them coffee. She was then ordered to
put her clothes back on and clean up. She picked up the dirty cups
and dishes and swept the floor, she said. Then she was returned to
the house with the other women. When the others asked what had
happened to her, she refused to tell them.

The second rape victim, age twenty-nine, reported to Human Rights
Watch that the police took her away from the house where she was
being held and brought her to another house. There she was placed in
a room and forced to strip naked. One after the other, five members
of the Serb forces entered the room to look at her body, but it was
only the last man who raped her, she said. While he was assaulting
her, the other four entered the room and watched. The woman also
stated that someone had placed a walkie-talkie under the bed in the
room, and that throughout the ordeal the Serbian forces shouted at
her via the walkie talkie to scare her. In all, she was held in the
room for about half an hour.

A doctor at the camp in Kukes where the refugees from Dragacin are
currently living told Human Rights Watch that three other women had
come to him yesterday to report that they had been raped. The doctor
said that one of these women showed obvious signs of severe emotional
distress. Other women held in the Dragacin houses told Human Rights
Watch that they had seen or heard women being taken by the Serbian
forces during their three days in captivity. One elderly woman from
Mujlan said that, on the third night, the police entered the house of
Avdi T., shining a flashlight in the faces of the women, many of whom
were trying to cover their heads with their scarves. They found one
woman and said, "You come with us." She returned approximately two
hours later and, when asked what happened, said, "Don't ask me
anything."

On Saturday, April 24, all of the women in Dragacin were forced by
government forces to walk to the nearby village of Dujle, where they
were held in the local school for two days without food or water,
although no one reported further physical abuse. On April 26, they
were taken in two buses to the village of Zhur, where they were
forced to walk across the border into Albania. Human Rights Watch has
received unconfirmed reports that rapes occurred between April 24 and
26.

Witnesses' descriptions of the uniforms - green camouflage and blue
camouflage - indicate that the incidents described above were a joint
operation by the Serbian special police (MUP) and Yugoslav Army (VJ).
Some of the perpetrators also wore black ski masks.